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246
Intrusion Detection using Sequences of System Calls
- Journal of Computer Security
, 1998
"... A method is introducted for detecting intrusions at the level of privileged processes. Evidence is given that short sequences of system calls executed by running processes are a good discriminator between normal and abnormal operating characteristics of several common UNIX programs. Normal behavio ..."
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Cited by 396 (15 self)
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A method is introducted for detecting intrusions at the level of privileged processes. Evidence is given that short sequences of system calls executed by running processes are a good discriminator between normal and abnormal operating characteristics of several common UNIX programs. Normal behavior is collected in two ways: Synthetically, by exercising as many normal modes of usage of a program as possible, and in a live user environment by tracing the actual execution of the program. In the former case several types of intrusive behavior were studied; in the latter case, results were analyzed for false positives. 1 Introduction Modern computer systems are plagued by security vulnerabilities. Whether it is the latest UNIX buffer overflow or bug in Microsoft Internet Explorer, our applications and operating systems are full of security flaws on many levels. From the viewpoint of the traditional security paradigm, it should be possible to eliminate such problems through more exten...
Vigilante: End-to-End Containment of Internet Worm Epidemics
, 2008
"... Worm containment must be automatic because worms can spread too fast for humans to respond. Recent work proposed network-level techniques to automate worm containment; these techniques have limitations because there is no information about the vulnerabilities exploited by worms at the network level. ..."
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Cited by 304 (6 self)
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Worm containment must be automatic because worms can spread too fast for humans to respond. Recent work proposed network-level techniques to automate worm containment; these techniques have limitations because there is no information about the vulnerabilities exploited by worms at the network level. We propose Vigilante, a new end-to-end architecture to contain worms automatically that addresses these limitations. In Vigilante, hosts detect worms by instrumenting vulnerable programs to analyze infection attempts. We introduce dynamic data-flow analysis: a broad-coverage host-based algorithm that can detect unknown worms by tracking the flow of data from network messages and disallowing unsafe uses of this data. We also show how to integrate other host-based detection mechanisms into the Vigilante architecture. Upon detection, hosts generate self-certifying alerts (SCAs), a new type of security alert that can be inexpensively verified by any vulnerable host. Using SCAs, hosts can cooperate to contain an outbreak, without having to trust each other. Vigilante broadcasts SCAs over an overlay network that propagates alerts rapidly and resiliently. Hosts receiving an SCA protect themselves by generating filters with vulnerability condition slicing: an algorithm that performs dynamic analysis of the vulnerable program to identify control-flow conditions that lead
Countering Code-Injection Attacks With Instruction-Set Randomization
- In Proceedings of the ACM Computer and Communications Security (CCS) Conference
, 2003
"... We describe a new, general approach for safeguarding systems against any type of code-injection attack. We apply Kerckhoff’s principle, by creating process-specific randomized instruction sets (e.g., machine instructions) of the system executing potentially vulnerable software. An attacker who does ..."
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Cited by 234 (26 self)
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We describe a new, general approach for safeguarding systems against any type of code-injection attack. We apply Kerckhoff’s principle, by creating process-specific randomized instruction sets (e.g., machine instructions) of the system executing potentially vulnerable software. An attacker who does not know the key to the randomization algorithm will inject code that is invalid for that randomized processor, causing a runtime exception. To determine the difficulty of integrating support for the proposed mechanism in the operating system, we modified the Linux kernel, the GNU binutils tools, and the bochs-x86 emulator. Although the performance penalty is significant, our prototype demonstrates the feasibility of the approach, and should be directly usable on a suitable-modified processor (e.g., the Transmeta Crusoe). Our approach is equally applicable against code-injecting attacks in scripting and interpreted languages, e.g., web-based SQL injection. We demonstrate this by modifying the Perl interpreter to permit randomized script execution. The performance penalty in this case is minimal. Where our proposed approach is feasible (i.e., in an emulated environment, in the presence of programmable or specialized hardware, or in interpreted languages), it can serve as a low-overhead protection mechanism, and can easily complement other mechanisms.
Architecture for an Artificial Immune System
, 2000
"... An articial immune system (ARTIS) is described which incorporates many properties of natural immune systems, including diversity, distributed computation, error tolerance, dynamic learning and adaptation and self-monitoring. ARTIS is a general framework for a distributed adaptive system and could ..."
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Cited by 173 (10 self)
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An articial immune system (ARTIS) is described which incorporates many properties of natural immune systems, including diversity, distributed computation, error tolerance, dynamic learning and adaptation and self-monitoring. ARTIS is a general framework for a distributed adaptive system and could, in principle, be applied to many domains. In this paper, ARTIS is applied to computer security, in the form of a network intrusion detection system called LISYS. LISYS is described and shown to be eective at detecting intrusions, while maintaining low false positive rates. Finally, similarities and dierences between ARTIS and Holland's classier systems are discussed. 1 INTRODUCTION The biological immune system (IS) is highly complicated and appears to be precisely tuned to the problem of detecting and eliminating infections. We believe that the IS provides a compelling example of a massively-parallel adaptive information-processing system, one which we can study for the purpose o...
Randomized Instruction Set Emulation To Disrupt Binary . . .
- ACM TRANSACTIONS ON INFORMATION SYSTEM SECURITY
, 2003
"... Many remote attacks against computer systems inject binary code into the execution path of a running program, gaining control of the program's behavior. If each defended system or program could use a machine instruction set that was both unique and private, such binary code injection attacks ..."
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Cited by 155 (3 self)
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Many remote attacks against computer systems inject binary code into the execution path of a running program, gaining control of the program's behavior. If each defended system or program could use a machine instruction set that was both unique and private, such binary code injection attacks would become extremely difficult if not impossible. A binary-to-binary translator provides an economic and flexible implementation path for realizing that idea. As a proof of concept, we describe a randomized instruction set emulator (RISE) based on the open-source Valgrind x86-to-x86 binary translator. Although currently very slow and memory-intensive, our prototype RISE can indeed disrupt binary code injection attacks against a program without requiring its recompilation, linking, or access to source code. We describe the RISE implementation, give evidence demonstrating that RISE defeats common attacks, consider consequences of the dense x86 instruction set on the method's effects, and discuss limitations of the RISE prototype as well as design tradeoffs and extensions of the underlying idea.
Efficient Techniques for Comprehensive Protection from Memory Error Exploits
, 2005
"... Despite the wide publicity received by buffer overflow attacks, the vast majority of today’s security vulnerabilities continue to be caused by memory errors, with a significant shift away from stack-smashing exploits to newer attacks such as heap overflows, integer overflows, and format-string attac ..."
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Cited by 148 (7 self)
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Despite the wide publicity received by buffer overflow attacks, the vast majority of today’s security vulnerabilities continue to be caused by memory errors, with a significant shift away from stack-smashing exploits to newer attacks such as heap overflows, integer overflows, and format-string attacks. While comprehensive solutions have been developed to handle memory errors, these solutions suffer from one or more of the following problems: high overheads (often exceeding 100%), incompatibility with legacy C code, and changes to the memory model to use garbage collection. Address space randomization (ASR) is a technique that avoids these drawbacks, but existing techniques for ASR do not offer a level of protection comparable to the above techniques. In particular, attacks that exploit relative distances between memory objects aren’t tackled by existing techniques. Moreover, these techniques are susceptible to information leakage and brute-force attacks. To overcome these limitations, we develop a new approach in this paper that supports comprehensive randomization, whereby the absolute locations of all (code and data) objects, as well as their relative distances are randomized. We argue that this approach provides probabilistic protection against all memory error exploits, whether they be known or novel. Our approach is implemented as a fully automatic source-to-source transformation which is compatible with legacy C code. The address-space randomizations take place at load-time or runtime, so the same copy of the binaries can be distributed to everyone — this ensures compatibility with today’s software distribution model. Experimental results demonstrate an average runtime overhead of about 11%.
Transparent Runtime Randomization for Security
, 2003
"... A large class of security attacks exploit software implementation vulnerabilities such as unchecked buffers. This paper proposes Transparent Runtime Randomization (TRR), a generalized approach for protecting against a wide range of security attacks. TRR dynamically and randomly relocates a program’s ..."
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Cited by 133 (9 self)
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A large class of security attacks exploit software implementation vulnerabilities such as unchecked buffers. This paper proposes Transparent Runtime Randomization (TRR), a generalized approach for protecting against a wide range of security attacks. TRR dynamically and randomly relocates a program’s stack, heap, shared libraries, and parts of its runtime control data structures inside the application memory address space. Making a program’s memory layout different each time it runs foils the attacker’s assumptions about the memory layout of the vulnera-ble program and makes the determination of critical address values difficult if not impossible. TRR is implemented by changing the Linux dynamic program loader, hence it is transparent to applications. We demonstrate that TRR is effective in defeating real security attacks, including malloc-based heap overflow, integer overflow, and double-free attacks, for which effective prevention mechanisms are yet to emerge. Furthermore, TRR incurs less than 9% program startup overhead and no runtime overhead. 1
SQLrand: Preventing SQL Injection Attacks
- In Proceedings of the 2nd Applied Cryptography and Network Security (ACNS) Conference
, 2004
"... We present a practical protection mechanism against SQL injection attacks. Such attacks target databases that are accessible through a web frontend, and take advantage of flaws in the input validation logic of Web components such as CGI scripts. We apply the concept of instruction-set randomizati ..."
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Cited by 125 (4 self)
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We present a practical protection mechanism against SQL injection attacks. Such attacks target databases that are accessible through a web frontend, and take advantage of flaws in the input validation logic of Web components such as CGI scripts. We apply the concept of instruction-set randomization to SQL, creating instances of the language that are unpredictable to the attacker.
Principles of a Computer Immune System
, 1997
"... Natural immune systems provide a rich source of inspiration for computer security in the age of the Internet. Immune systems have many features that are desirable for the imperfect, uncontrolled, and open environments in which most computers currently exist. These include distributability, diversity ..."
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Cited by 102 (6 self)
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Natural immune systems provide a rich source of inspiration for computer security in the age of the Internet. Immune systems have many features that are desirable for the imperfect, uncontrolled, and open environments in which most computers currently exist. These include distributability, diversity, disposability, adaptability, autonomy, dynamic coverage, anomaly detection, multiple layers, identity via behavior, no trusted components, and imperfect detection. These principles suggest a wide variety of architectures for a computer immune system.
Civitas: Toward a secure voting system
- In IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy
, 2008
"... Civitas is the first electronic voting system that is coercion-resistant, universally and voter verifiable, and suitable for remote voting. This paper describes the design and implementation of Civitas. Assurance is established in the design through security proofs, and in the implementation through ..."
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Cited by 92 (9 self)
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Civitas is the first electronic voting system that is coercion-resistant, universally and voter verifiable, and suitable for remote voting. This paper describes the design and implementation of Civitas. Assurance is established in the design through security proofs, and in the implementation through information-flow security analysis. Experimental results give a quantitative evaluation of the tradeoffs between time, cost, and security. 1.
